Satter Ramblings

Build Your Own Platform

I have been thinking and discussing with some folks about platforms. Currently there are two approaches to building a platform. The first is building the runtime environment. The quintessential example is Windows OS. If you build desktop apps you use tools specifically designed for building applications on the Windows OS like Visual Basic, PowerBuilder and C++ with MFC. With the rise of the web and no browser monopoly, developers had to deal with fragmentation of the platform. The developer tools and frameworks began to become the platform. Essentially the tools hid the OS or Browser from the developer. Developers just needed to learn the framework and then deploy where the app would run. The two biggest runtime platforms today are Java and .NET. Java’s write once run everywhere captured developers attention. While Java failed on the GUI front I believe it was an implementation issue not a problem with the paradigm.

As iOS market share erodes and Android continues to fragment, developers need to tackle this problem of write once run everywhere head on. Which brings us back to the question of building a platform. The difference is that you the developer must pick what constitutes the platform. What I mean by platform is you the developer chose the OS or your tools as the platform. Neither choices is better than the other. Rather the choice defines how you develop your app and constraints that might be imposed by your choice.

.NET 4 Migration

How do you go about migrating from an older .NET Framework to .NET Framework 4? With .NET Framework 4 migration is actually pretty easy.

Mobile Web Development

With mobile development one can build many types of application with .Net. Just like the desktop and laptop world these applications can be broken down into two types of applications WinForms or Web based. A lot of the entries on the blog are about the Compact Framework, so what about the web. This entry looks at web development with ASP.Net 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008.

Performance

I have been working on several projects. One of the things I have been using for those projects is the Mobile Line of Business Accelerator. In public presentations some developers have asked why when displaying information does the LOB Accelerator end up looping through the data twice. Once for building the data objects and then again to display the newly created data objects. So the last couple of days I have looked at the performance implications of looping twice.

VM Demo Environment

I am currently working on a project base on the Mobile Line of Business Accelerator. Essentially you can take the LOB Accelerator and modify it for your own needs. One thing I don't have while I am on the road is Rob Tiffany's mobile data center. However that is not a problem as long as I don't want to handle 7 million rows an hour.

Compact Framework and LINQ

One of the exciting things in .Net 3.5 is LINQ. Being a device developer though can I use LINQ. You can use LINQ in Compact Framework 3.5 although not all features are available. Noticeably missing is LINQ for SQL. However that is not a big deal you get standard operators and being able to query objects and XML.

Using Push Data in Mobile Applications

One very common theme I hear these days from customers is "How can I not only notify people of an item to work on but let them react immediately to that notification?" The typical scenario is approval of some business process for example a purchase order.

Control your iPhone using .Net

I had been furiously working on a project for a client the last couple of weeks. However, I managed to squeeze in some time to play with my new iPhone. Ok the price dropped and my Nano is old... that's my story and I am sticking to it. I did poke around the Internet and found out about iTunesMobileDevice API. Then I got real lucky since I am a .Net and VS2008 user. I found a C# Wrapper in Google Code. So what can you do with the API - read on.

VS2008 Beta 2 First Look

This weekend I had time to sit down and really look at Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2. This entry will cover how to build a Compact Framework 3.5 application using VS2008. At the same time it will give a brief tour of VS2008.

Mobile Web Book

Cameron Moll a author, presenter and web designer, will be releasing a new book about building mobile websites. The book Mobile Web Design per Cameron Moll

The premise of this book is threefold: Analyze current and future technologies relevant to mobile web content, confront the limitations of existing mobile devices, and discover methods for exploiting the unique opportunities afforded by mobility and its devices, both current and future.